DESCRIPTIONSurveying Catania from the city’s origins to the present amounts to seeking out the cultural code or codes in its genome, as it were, which allows historians to rebuild – on terrain wracked by the upheavals of men and nature – that symbolic structure which every society, through its institutions, tries to construct and which serves to define that society’s identity. This is a long tale, with events taking place against changing backdrops, at times colourful and embracing the whole community, at times bleak and tragic. And nothing must be lost, no detail neglected, of those memories that we will now retrace in the telling of our tale. We owe it to our pride in, and to the overpowering stubbornness of, our role as historians.